The Faces of Modigliani: Identity Politics under Fascism.
Klein, M. & Brown, E, (2004) in M. Klein (ed.), Modigliani: beyond the myth.
New York / New Haven Conn.: Jewish Museum. pp25-42.
This is a
personal summary of the paper ‘The Faces of Modigliani: Identity Politics under
Fascism’ by Klein, M. & Brown, E. (2004)
in M. Klein (ed.), Modigliani: beyond the
myth. New York / New Haven Conn.:
Jewish Museum. pp25-42.
Who is
defined as “European”?
Despite their unvarying style, Amedeo Modigliani’s portraits of faces do
show variety. In the time of Modigliani,
Montparnasse was a centre of modernist art and a home for émigrés: the
portraits that he painted here effectively ask ‘Who is defined as “European” in
the years around the First World War?’
Modigliani’s style cannot easily be defined. Characteristics of his portrait style
include: the influence of African sculpture; emphasis on qualities of passivity
and modesty; and styles of imagery that originate more from Eastern Europe and
the Orient than from Western Europe and which define the ‘otherness’ of
Modigliani’s subject matter.
A modernist
Modigliani was born an Italian Sephardic Jew.
In Paris Modigliani’s origin distinguished him from Eastern European
Jews. And to be Italian in Paris was to
embody a land that had been snubbed diplomatically as a backward nation at the
dangerous southern margin of European civilisation. Modigliani’s choice of Italian women as
models reinforced Parisians’ preconceived notions of Italian indolence.
Modigliani was, however, from Livorno, in Tuscany, the birthplace of
Renaissance art, and this, together with his ‘aristocratic bearing’, gave him
an air cultural authenticity in Paris. Conversely,
Modigliani’s success in Paris made him a celebrated artist in Italy.
Modigliani died before the Fascist revolution of Benito Mussolini: after
this revolution Modigliani’s legacy was fought over as Italian identity was
itself redefined.
Livorno was well-established as a cosmopolitan city in which Jews had
long played an integral part. A greater
dichotomy in Modigliani in the 1920s was his role primarily as a Tuscan, rather
than as an Italian.
The Futurists hung works by Modigliani in the Italian section of the
Exposition Internationale d’Art Moderne in Geneva in 1920, and in doing this
they were the first to ‘claim Modigliani for the patriotic cause’. Modigliani was first hung publically in Italy
in 1922 in Venice. Also included in this
show – the XIII Bienalle – were African sculptures.
Modigliani’s work was not received well, but this was apparently not on
the basis of Modigliani’s Jewishness or on his style’s association with ‘l’arte
negra’: he was decried for being a modernist.
Self-discovery
in Bohemian Paris
In 1927 Giovanni Scheiwiller produced the first Italian monograph on Modigliani:
this is the origin of the ‘standard interpretation of Modigliani’s experience
abroad’: of self-discovery in Bohemian Paris; of Modigliani’s ‘italianita’
being revealed in the artist’s elegance of style; and the ‘humility’ of his
portraits of women being in the line of the old masters’ depictions of the
Madonna.
Modigliani’s Jewishness was not mentioned by Scheiwiller. Scheiwiller’s ‘interpretation’ of the
decadence of Modigliani’s life and his restlessness is ‘displaced onto the
contemporary Parisian environment’.
Positive
stereotypes of Jewish religion and culture
It was in 1929 that Lamberto Vitali gave an account of Modigliani’s
‘racial qualities’: in Modigliani the qualities of the Italian and the Jewish
were combined and both were displayed to good effect. But Vitali is writing about himself and his
own Italian Jewish identity as much as about Modigliani.
Vitali was nevertheless the first Italian critic to describe positive
stereotypes of Jewish religion and culture: the eroticism of Modigliani’s nudes
was ‘transfigured into chaste emotion’; and Modigliani’s sensuality drew on
Judaism’s ancient worship of women ‘with the most ancient and beautiful of
hymns’. And Vitali found that Modigliani’s draughtsmanship echoed that of the
14th Century Tuscan Christian artist Simone Martini.
Thus, Modigliani embodied Jewish and Christian, and ancient and modern.
1930: a climate
of intensified chauvinism
The 1930 Venice Biennale showed a large number of Modigliani’s
works. The Italian businessman Riccardo
Gualino provided many of the Modiglianis for the Biennale. Gualino was advised in his purchasing of art
by Lionello Venturi who believed that Cezanne epitomised modern art.
Venturi championed Modigliani as a model for Italian artists. Marinetti – the leader of the Futurists –
took issue with Venturi, wanting to promote Futurism as the ideal of modern
Italian art. Gualino favoured the Turin
school known as the Gruppo dei Sei in preference to the Futurists: he gave them
access to his Modiglianis. Venturi championed Modigliani as the ‘outsider of
the art world’ who had remained open to any and all influences without
allegiance to any programme or movement.
The 1930 Venice Biennale was the first in which its administration
intended its content to promote Fascist values.
Consequently artists aspiring to the Biennale tended to work from
classical or Latin sources. Thus the Modiglianis
in the exhibition contrasted with ‘this climate of intensified
chauvinism’.
Paradoxically it was Antonio Maraini – the new secretary general of the Venice
Biennale – who then commissioned a Modigliani retrospective exhibition from
Venturi, also in 1930. Venturi tended to
be anti-Fascist; the location for the retrospective was to be Turin – also anti-Fascist. Gualino was not anti-Fascist, but he was not a
willing servant of Mussolini. At the Venice
Biennale Venturi championed Modigliani as a model Italian: open-minded, open to
influences across national boundaries, and to be preferred to Italians who find
fault in anything non-Italian. Thus the Modigliani
retrospective was politically loaded.
Thirty seven Modigliani portraits and one landscape were in the
show. Critics applauded Venturi’s
endeavour in curating the show, but they cared little for the show’s ‘European
perspective’. There was anti-Semitism in
criticism of the show, and this was presented as slurs on, amongst other things:
Modigliani’s eroticism; Jewish art dealers who handled Modigliani’s works;
Eastern European Jewish artists in Paris; and Modigliani’s ‘melancholic
disposition’.
The
wandering Jew
A powerful perception ‘that was present in European fin-de-siècle
Europe’ was that of the “wandering Jew”.
It was held that the Jewish diaspora was rootless and thus unable to
develop a distinctive Jewish artistic culture.
Moreover, it was held that this diaspora was responsible for
disseminating modernism. Modigliani was
understood and accepted as Italian because Jews had ‘lived on the peninsula for
two thousand years’, but when ‘in exile’ in Paris, Modigliani had become an
émigré Jew as much as an Italian yearning for home.
The stereotypes of Jewishness were applied to Modigliani and his life
and death in Paris: he had assimilated the modern art around him because Jews
had no artistic culture of their own, and yet as a Tuscan he had drawn on his
Renaissance heritage, thus proving his genius.
The influential critic – and advisor to Mussolini – Margherita Sarfatti
– a Jew – argued that Zionism was a threat to Italy and its Jews. Sarfatti ignored Modigliani’s Jewishness and
regarded him as having been an ambassador of Tuscany abroad. It was held that Modigliani had nothing in
common with the works of his fellow Jews in Paris: Marc Chagall, the
abstractionist and the disturbing Chaim Soutine.
Modigliani’s
portraits
Modigliani’s portraits were received as modernist versions of the old
masters. The nudes were compared with
Botticelli; the faces of demure women were compared with those of Madonnas and
other saints and virgins. ‘Stereotypes
of Jewish suffering’ merged with ‘Christian misericorda’. This was symbolic of the Vatican’s
recently-made concordat with the new Fascist government.
The narrative of Modigliani’s life was given overt Christian symbolism:
his time in Paris was a ‘road to Calvary’; Modigliani was a ‘hermit of beauty’ who
sought neither fame nor disciples; ‘the diasporic Jew and the patriotic Italian
came together in this “martyr for art”’.
Alberto Savinio asserted that ‘the destiny of all “good” Jews is to
relive the tragedy of Christ – to be Christianised’.
Fascism and
duplicity
Subsequent to the 1930 retrospective exhibition, the proponents of Modigliani
began to suffer under Fascism. Venturi
fled to Paris. Gualino was
imprisoned. Carlo Levi – leader of the Gruppo
dei Sei - was exiled. Gualino’s
collection of Modiglianis went to private collectors but none entered a
national museum: one was acquired by a gallery in Berlin and became subject to
the Nazis’ degenerate art collection.
In his book of 1928 ‘Kunst und Rasse’, Paul Schultze-Naumberg had described
Modigliani’s work ‘Ragazza’ as typifying the ‘biological degeneracy of modern
art’. Schultze-Naumberg sought to show
the similarity of ‘Ragazza’ with photographs of ‘the mentally and physically
“diseased”’. Thus modern art was held to
be ‘sick’.
Klein and Brown show the duplicity of the Fascist regime in the way in
which it contributed eleven Modiglianis to an exhibition of modern Italian art
in Paris in 1935, though the eleven works were selected for not depicting
Italian people.
After 1938 the intensity of discourse in this ‘culture war’ increased with
the introduction of racial laws. An
Italian anti-degenerate art campaign sought out principally French art, ‘living
Italian modernists’, ‘geometric abstractionists’ and ‘Rationalist architects’.
Simultaneously, avant-garde Italian artists defended modernism from the
charge of Jewishness. Udo Bernasconi had
contributed to a 1927 published work by Scheiwiller which contained first-hand reminiscences
of Modigliani, but now Bernasconi initially defended Modigliani’s style, but
then described his ‘caricatural style’ as ‘a product of Modigliani’s “Israelite
blood”’.
Even so, during the Second World War Modiglianis remained in private
collections and there is evidence that his work was not universally reviled by
the Fascists – because of his great international reputation.
A
‘collective portrait of the socially marginal’: the ‘European tribe’
Modigliani shows the complexity of the dynamics of negative Jewish
stereotyping.
Modigliani’s ‘otherness’ was a changeable matter, depending on
context.
There is no way of knowing if Modigliani felt
‘other’.
There is no evidence that explains his affinity for ‘l’arte negra’.
Klein and Brown argue that the strongest evidence lies in Modigliani’s
manner of painting the eyes of a portrait: these are typically blank, in an
African ‘non gaze’. Thus, Modigliani’s
faces suppress emotion: each becomes a part of the ‘collective portrait of the
socially marginal’.
Klein and Brown argue that Modigliani painted the ‘European tribe’ in a
challenge to the monolithic Christian perception of Europe.
